New York Times columnist scolds Twisters producers for not including climate change plot - after film's anti-woke storyline was credited for huge box office takings

A New York Times columnist has slammed the producers of the blockbuster hit 'Twisters' for not including a climate change plot - after the film's anti-woke storyline was credited for huge box office takings. 

Margaret Renkl called out director Lee Isaac Chung in a scathing opinion piece published Monday, criticizing his decision to omit any reference to global warming in the film's plot- after he said he doesn't believe films are meant to be 'message-oriented.' 

The movie, a long-awaited sequel to the 1996 hit 'Twister', stars Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as storm chasers battling extreme weather. It's been tearing up the box office, with many crediting its success to an approach that avoids political messaging.

Renkl, however, who watched the film on 'the hottest day ever recorded on Earth,' argued that 'Twisters' missed a golden opportunity to address the climate crisis.

'I'm guessing the decision to exclude even a passing reference to climate change in a film about weather disasters has very little to do with cinematic art, or even with climate science, and everything to do with avoiding the cross hairs of political polarity,' she stated in the New York Times article Monday. 

'With movie attendance still far below prepandemic levels, who could blame the makers of 'Twisters' for wanting to protect their film from the right-wing vigilantes targeting wokeness?' 

'I do. I can't help it, I blame them,' she said. 

In her review, the columnist reflects on the dissonance between the film's dramatic portrayal of increasingly violent tornadoes and its complete silence on the broader implications of climate change.

She argued: 'Artifacts of popular culture have always had immense power to articulate changing attitudes, engage empathy and open firmly resistant mind.

'With MAGA politicians at every level denying that climate change even exists, real climate legislation is now nearly impossible to pass,' she continued. 'And with the Supreme Court determined to quash all executive-branch efforts to address the changing climate, too, we seem to be at the mercy of artists to save us.'

'If only they would. In a missed opportunity the size of an F5 tornado's debris field, we got no help from the makers of 'Twisters.'

Earlier this month, Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung has opened up on why the blockbuster doesn't address climate change or global warming.

Chung told CNN: 'I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don't ever feel like it is putting forward any message.

'I just don't feel like films are meant to be message-oriented, I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what's happening on the ground … we don't shy away from saying that things are changing.

'I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we're preaching a message, because that's certainly not what I think cinema should be about. I think it should be a reflection of the world.'

In 2021, The top US emergency management official has claimed that more powerful, destructive, and deadly storms will be the 'new normal' due to climate change, following Kentucky's devastating tornadoes.

'This is going to be our new normal,' Deanne Criswell, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told CNN at the time. 

'The effects that we're seeing from climate change are the crisis of our generation,' the FEMA chief added.